Iron (The Warding Book 1)

by Robin L. Cole

  His rage touched me. Sometimes I forgot I had friends in places I never thought to look. I smiled and patted his arm. “I know you would have, thank you. But, if it’s all the same, I’d rather not talk about that right now. I’m just trying to work through it and get back to a normal life. Make amends for how shitty I’ve been lately and all that.” The lies tumbled out, so natural that I hated myself for them. I forced myself to brighten, adopting a more cheerful smile as I asked, “Is Jen working tonight?”

  He cocked his head to the side, one eyebrow skewed upward. “Nah, she’s off the rest of the week. Tony came home on Tuesday. Didn’t you know?”

  I didn’t, of course, but I couldn’t let him know that. If Jenni hadn’t broadcasted our parting of ways, I didn’t want to be the one to break the news. I was filled with equal parts relief and devastation: glad that I wouldn’t have to face her tonight, but oh-so-sad that I had had no idea her beau had finally returned home. In the old days, we would have planned a huge, overly complicated homecoming party and gotten rip-roaring drunk together to celebrate such a momentous occasion. Now, thanks to my own actions, I hadn’t even gotten a cursory text. I wondered if my hunch had been right and if he had proposed yet. If he had, and she still hadn’t reached out to me…

  I fought to keep the smile on my face and waved it off like it was no big deal. “Oh, yeah. I thought she had said something about picking up a shift tonight. I guess I’ll just have a drink and, you know, exorcise a couple demons or something. Gotta get back in the saddle.”

  Concern was clear upon the big man’s face, making me feel like the most miserable shit to ever be shat upon the earth. “Yeah, okay. But, hey, if you want to talk it out or somethin’ I could get Neil to watch the door. We could have a beer or two.”

  “That’s okay. I’m probably not very good company right now anyhow. Maybe next time?” His sympathy was striking right through to the heart of me. My lower lip wanted to tremble and I was having a hard time keeping that traitorous fucker in check.

  He grinned. “Okay. I’m holding you to that.”

  I threw my arms around him in a quick hug to hide the devastation on my face. “You’re the best, ‘Rigo. Thanks.”

  As we parted, he said, “It’s good to see you back. We missed you.”

  I quickly wiped away the tear that had the audacity to make its way down my cheek and hurried back to the table Mairi had picked. I slid into the seat and gripped the edge of the table like it would keep me from sliding under the choppy waves of my emotions. I managed to act normal when the waitress stopped by to take my order. Thank god she was new and there were no uncomfortable questions or pleasantries to deal with.

  When she walked away, my spine went limp and I slumped back into the seat. I raked my hair back with one hand. “Holy shit, this was a bad idea. A baaaaaaad idea.”

  Mairi squeezed my hand. “I’m sorry. I know this is hard.”

  “Hard doesn’t even begin to describe it.” I hadn’t spared a single thought on Gilroy’s or the friends I had made here over the years since the night Argoth had brought reality crashing down around me. That night, I had labeled the place as the “bad spot” in my memory banks and locked it away. All the happy memories had gone with it, buried deep in an attempt to forget my fear. Coming back now just made me realize how far I had strayed from the path of my old, everyday life. I was filled with conflicted emotions and just wanted to run away before they overwhelmed me.

  I murmured my thanks when the waitress put my glass of Riesling down on the table in front of me. A big gulp went a long way toward settling my frazzled nerves. A few deep, meditative breaths brought me back from the edge. At least I no longer felt the overwhelming need to run, screaming, from the room. I tried to speak as low and slow as possible, moving my lips minimally behind my glass. “Let’s get this done fast. Table closest to the door. Two college meatheads, both hopelessly flirting with the waitress?”

  “Yup; check. The one in the Devil’s jersey isn’t so meathead-y though.”

  I stole a glance over at her from the corner of my eye. She was eying the male specimen in question with a particularly fond gaze. I smirked. This pretending to be alone thing was going to be tricky enough. I didn’t need her sass making me laugh. “Cool your jets, kid. We’re working tonight. Pick him up after we’ve cased the joint.”

  “Fine, fine. Proceed.”

  I went on to the next table. And so on, and so on. My heart sunk and my nerves ratcheted up with every one of her confirmations. This wasn’t one of those leisurely café trips or a stroll through some mom and pop bookstore, where we could meander and chat. Sitting alone, for all anyone else knew, made me feel vulnerable. Not to mention I also felt more asinine with every passing moment, muttering behind my glass and hoping no one would report my odd behavior back to Jenni. I wanted so badly for us to find him. I wanted to know all the anxiety I was putting myself through being back here was for something. Instead I danced the old familiar two-step with futility.

  Gutted and pretty much beyond hope, I flashed a quick glance over my shoulder. There was a smattering of tables set deeper in the corner, almost out of sight of the door. I hoped my look could be taken as casually looking around for the waitress, instead of the jerky, desperate thing it was. I had all the grace of a horny teenager trying to put his arms across the back of a date’s seat at the movies. Thankfully, only two of the tables were occupied and my sad attempt at nonchalance was only greeted with one annoyed stare. The sad farce was coming to an end. Another sad, dead end.

  “Two tables back. Two young professional types, likely on a date and now thinking I’m some sort of gawking homophobe creeper given the look the dark haired one just gave me.”

  Mairi smothered her giggle. “Yeah, he doesn’t seem the biggest fan of you right now.”

  “It was just one little glance.” I sighed. “Whatever. Last one then: table in the far back corner. Middle-aged loner reading Steinbeck, nursing a Guinness.”

  I gazed into my nearly empty glass, waiting for the final, crushing blow of disappointment. It took a moment for me to register that she hadn’t responded. In fact, when my head snapped up, I found her eyes darting back and forth between my face and some unknown point behind me, so wide they had stretched to anime proportions. Her jaw was moving up and down but only a small, strangled sort of mewling whimper emerged.

  I damn near shit my pants.

  My heart, formerly lodged in the vicinity of my stomach, seemed to remember its job and began hammering in my chest. A chill ran through my body; hot first, then cold. The hair on my arms stood on end. I felt dizzy and sick and bounce-up-and-down excited all at the same time. I leaned forward toward her, when what I really wanted to do was whip back around to get a better look. I gripped the edge of the table and tried my damnedest to keep my face from showing my manic excitement as I hissed, “Are you serious? Is that him?”

  “I don’t know!” she squeaked. She fumbled around in her cavernous purse for, what I assumed, was her phone. “I can’t tell you what he looks like if can’t see him. But if I can’t see him that says something!”

  “Are you serious?” I repeated, my voice raising an octave. It seemed too good to be true. Too weird to be true. I had hoped to hear those words for so long that they now sounded fake coming out of her mouth. Some insistent little part of my brain wanted to make extra sure that it wasn’t being screwed with, however dumb it made me sound. “There’s really no one there?”

  She fixed me with an incredulous look beyond her years. One of those “stop being intentionally dense, you sound like a moron” looks. “Would I lie about this?” She already had the phone to her ear.

  I struggled against the urge to fling my arm out and point, like that would somehow help. “Wait! His beer is right there on the table. Right there, along the far side. Can’t you see that?”

  “No, I can’t see that either! I don’t how he’s doing it, but he must have the whole table cloaked—sort of. I mean, not th
e table itself obviously, but himself and everything on it. Shit, that’s scary powerful.” Her attention went to the phone at her ear. “Seana, get Kaine! I think we found him!”

  While she coordinated whatever the hell it was we were supposed to do next, I tried to calm down. That was hard, given how fast my heart was beating. If I didn’t get a grip on my roller-coaster emotions, someone might have me carted off to Arkham for talking to people only I could see. It probably would have been helpful if we had planned out Phase II of the Catch the Lynx plan prior, rather than scrambling to do so in the heat of the moment.

  Taking more of those slow, drawn out breaths to keep myself from bursting, I tried to relax back into what I hoped was a perfectly normal, bored pose. My wine was almost gone, so I picked up my glass and knocked back the rest. That gave me the perfect reason to risk Mr. Dark Professional’s wrath by casually scanning the room for the waitress, ending my perusal with a penetrating glance at the table in the shadows.

  I couldn’t look long without drawing attention to myself, but I thought—just maybe—there was indeed a resemblance to the man in the old photo. His hair was shorter now, with some grey mixed in among the brown, but the shape of his face was similar. He had traded in his sunglasses for wire-framed reading glasses and his clothing was updated to the nondescript norm of the everyday man. A dark blue button-down shirt, perhaps paired with some khakis and loafers. A black satchel rested casually over the back of the vacant chair to his left, some papers peaking over its open edge.

  For all intents, he was just some regular old Joe relaxing with a beer after a day at the office. Nothing special, nothing fancy—nothing memorable. Just the kind of get-up someone who didn’t want to be noticed might adopt.

  “Dammit. Kaine and Gannon left twenty minutes ago,” Mairi said, pulling my attention back to her. “Seana is going to get in touch with them now, but she thinks they were headed into the city. I don’t know how fast they’ll be able to get here.”

  “So, what? We just sit and wait?” I hoped my exclamation hadn’t come out loud enough for any of the nearby tables to hear. It was getting really hard to keep up my sitting alone act, when I was ready to bust out of my own skin. If she meant “city” like I usually meant “city”, meaning New York City, who knew how long it would take them to get back. Traffic was always abysmal around these parts and even worse there. Those five or six miles could take almost an hour some nights, and the Lynx was right there! So close I could call out his name and get his attention—and instead we had to wait? That was downright stupid.

  She looked as peeved as I felt. “She said to wait. We need to keep an eye on him and hope like hell he doesn’t move.”

  I wanted to scream. All that work, all that wasted time, and now that we had finally found him, we were told to hurry up and wait for the big boys to come in and call the shots. The thought made my blood boil. His beer was more than half empty. It went without saying that if he left, we were screwed. She couldn’t see him to track him and I wasn’t sure I could maintain enough secrecy to follow a stranger through the city, even if he didn’t have any other wily fae tricks up his sleeve to avoid just such attention. Sure, we could continue to camp out at Gilroy’s and hope to stumble across him another time but that was the very last thing on earth I wanted to do. This night seemed fated to be the single best time to stumble upon him. Another attempt would likely draw unwanted attention and result in some sort of debacle.

  “Like hell I’m sitting here with my thumb up my ass.” I set my glass back down on the table with incredible restraint. She blanched at the look on my face. There must have been straight up evil coming out of my eyes. I pushed my chair back and stood up; deaf to her sputtered warnings. Nothing was stopping me. It was time for me and the Lynx to have a little chat.

  I pulled out a chair at his table and sat down, facing the Lynx with the Handsome Professional Couple at my back. I set my phone down in front of me. Hopefully I could keep this from looking like I was having a conversation with an empty chair in a dark corner. If all else failed, I could always try and make it look like I was on the phone. Still, expediency would be my friend in this endeavor. The faster I got this over with, the less insane I ran the risk of looking.

  Only problem was, the Lynx hadn’t so much as looked up at me. One would think, that when a strange woman invited herself on over, you’d naturally look up—to give her a questioning glance of “what the hell do you think you’re doing,” at the very least. It disoriented me for a moment, to find myself being ignored. I was running high on adrenaline, so pumped to have finally, at long last, found this son of a bitch that I could hardly contain myself—and here he was, flat-out ignoring me?

  I was about to lose my shit and, in all likelihood, blow any attempt I had at keeping this on the DL when it dawned on me that he had no clue that I could see him. For all he knew, I thought this table was vacant. Hopping to a different seat might be a bit odd but it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that I had switched seats for privacy. He had no reason to suspect that I knew he was sitting there, a few feet away from me.

  Well, wasn’t I about to rock his pretty little world?

  “So, do you normally just ignore pretty ladies when they come take a seat at your table?” I asked, sugar-coating my sarcasm so heavily that it damn near dripped onto the floor in a sticky puddle. That got me a response. His head snapped up, eyes wide behind his glasses. The shock of our gazes meeting drove them wider still. His mouth opened a bit and then closed, as if he was stopping himself from saying something that might give away his presence. I leaned forward and smiled. “Let me save you some trouble. I’m Caitlin, you’re called the Lynx, and yes, I can see you.”

  “Impossible.” Even hushed, his voice was deeper than I had expected. It rolled over me, a low baritone that spoke of years I could only begin to fathom.

  “Not for me.”

  He cocked his head slightly to the side, brow furrowed, and stared at me as if I were a hard math problem. I let the gears turn. Every second he remained in that seat was a win for the home team. Not that I particularly enjoyed being examined like some exotic new species on exhibit at the zoo. I had just begun to squirm when he finished his evaluation. He closed his book with care and set it down on the table. He sat back, folding his hands together over one knee. “This is quite a surprise. I was unaware there were any Warders in Riverview.”

  “It was a doozy of a revelation to me too.” I scooched my chair just a bit closer and made sure my face was angled away from the view of anyone around us. “Look, I don’t mean to be rude but this is as awkward of a situation as I’ve ever been in, and time might be of the essence here.”

  He tensed, a shadow crossing his face. I knew that look. That was the “about to make a break for the door to avoid the crazy chick” look I had seen on many human faces in this bar over the years. This was my first time being the crazy chick, thankfully, but I still needed to stall him. The words tumbled out in a rush, “Please; don’t go. I’ve been looking high and low for you all over this damn city for months now. I know this is really, really odd, but I need you to hear me out.”

  He didn’t relax but he also didn’t bolt from his seat. I took that as an indication to continue only, in that moment, I realized I had no idea what to say. We really should have worked on Part II of the plan more. Oh well. In for a penny… “Some friends of mine need your help. They found me a few months ago and told me I’m the only one they’ve ever found with this Gift and that means I’m pretty much their only chance of finding you, too.”

  He nodded in time with my words, almost as if he was agreeing with me. “They are probably right. The Warding is so rare nowadays that many believe it has since died out entirely. I myself have traveled far in this world and even then have encountered very few with your Gift—the last, many years ago.”

  Oh man, that was tempting. I fought back a dozen questions and stuck to the task at hand, wondering all the while how far away Kaine and Gannon
were, and what sort of hell might break loose once they arrived. Crap. Suddenly the images played out in my head like an old black and white movie: the boys bursting into the bar, the Lynx spooking like a feral dog, and me losing my one and only chance to get free of this mess. I didn’t know this dude from a stranger on the street, but something told me that a man who went to such lengths to hide from prying eyes would not be pleased if he found himself starring down four-on-one odds.

  So, screw it. I wasn’t good at this fae politicking bullshit anyhow and I didn’t know how much time I had before this all went pear-shaped on me. I dropped all pretenses and laid it out for him. “Believe me, I was just as shocked to find out I am what I am as you were. I had no idea anyone in my family could ever have been one of you, so there’s a damn good chance you know more about what I am than I do. Hell, maybe I’ll tell you that fun little tale over a beer some time, and you can tell me what you may or may not know about my fairy-banging ancestors. Right now, though, I don’t have time for that.”

  “Fair enough.” He chuckled. Was that a little glimmer of respect I saw there, lurking in those hazel peepers? He picked up his beer and took a long gulp of it. “I take it these ‘friends’ of yours warned you that I am not a man who likes to be found, hence my need for the glamour. While I am very impressed that you have managed to track me down, it does pose some…inconvenience for me.”

  Shit. That was not a point in my favor. I held up a hand in front of me, trying to keep it low to the table in an ultimately futile gesture of pleading. “I know, and I’m really sorry to invade your privacy like this. Truly, I am. I know that doesn’t mean much, coming from someone who has you cornered in a bar, but please understand that I didn’t have a choice. My life has gotten very interesting over the past few months, and by interesting, I mean bat crap crazy. I made a mistake. I agreed to help these people find you in return for their protection without realizing what a ‘pact’ meant.”